Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November’s elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups’ internal operations.

That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections – twice what they had been expected to commit.

Just the spending linked to the Koch network is more than the $370 million that John McCain raised for his entire presidential campaign four years ago. And the $1 billion total surpasses the $750 million that Barack Obama, one of the most prolific fundraisers ever, collected for his 2008 campaign.

The undisputed master of Super PAC money is Mitt Romney. In the primary season alone, Romney’s rich friends invested $52 million in his Super PAC, Restore Our Future – a number that’s expected to more than double in the coming months. This unprecedented infusion of money from America’s monied elites underscores the radical transformation of the Republican Party, which has made defending the interests of 0.0001 percent the basis of its entire platform. “Money buys power,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman observed recently, “and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties.” In short, the political polarization and gridlock in Washington are a direct result of the GOP’s capitulation to Big Money. Here are the 16 donors who have given at least $1 million each to elect Romney – and what they expect in return for their investment:
Read more here.

President Obama’s response to the SCOTUS CitizenS United decision:

VIDEOS of some of our citizen’s speaking on and making efforts to correct this shameful decision:

Corrected: Retired Justice John Paul Stevens said Wednesday that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s “not true” response to President Obama’s comments on the Citizens United decision is among several indications that the court majority has had second thoughts about the breadth of its reasoning.

Stevens was a dissenter in the 5-4 decision that allowed unlimited independent spending by corporations on behalf of political candidates. The majority opinion stated that the government may not restrict political speech simply because some speakers are disfavored. But “somewhat inconsistently,” Stevens said, the majority also said it was not reaching the question of whether foreign individuals or associations could be prevented from influencing the political process.

Alito mouthed “not true” after Obama stated in his State of the Union address that Citizens United would open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in U.S. elections. “Justice Alito’s reaction does persuade me that in due course it will be necessary for the court to issue an opinion explicitly crafting an exception that will create a crack in the foundation of the Citizens United majority opinion,” Stevens said. “For his statement that it is ‘not true’ that foreign entities will be among the beneficiaries of Citizens United offers good reason to predict there will not be five votes for such a result when a case arises. …

“It will be necessary to’ explain why the First Amendment provides greater protection to the campaign speech of some non-voters than to that of other non-voters.”

SCOTUSblog, the New York Times blog The Caucus and the Los Angeles Times blog Politics Now have stories on the speech (PDF), delivered at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock.

Something Must Be Done
by BooMan
Wed May 30th, 2012 at 01:46:37 PM EST

We have to find a way to survive this. And then he have to find a way to turn off the spigot. I’m indescribably angry about what the Supreme Court did to our democracy with their Citizens United ruling. And if rich billionaires think I’m alone, they’re badly mistaken. This isn’t a threat; it’s a confident prediction. There will be civil unrest in a large scale before long if our elections continue to be little more than pissing matches between rival billionaires and if the Republican Party continues to survive in its current form solely through the use of limitless contributions from the incredibly wealthy and ever-increasing efforts to suppress the non-white vote.

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Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.